Death to the Dictator! Witnessing Iran’s Election and the Crippling of the Islamic Republic

On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime
minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young
internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he
needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in
Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous
three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with
helmets and flak jackets, had been bundled around Baghdad in an
armoured convoy, meeting anyone there was to meet. They’d been
introduced to the prime minister’s council of advisers, glad-handed
the Iraqi Investment National Commission and spoken to a group of
engineering students from Baghdad University; they’d even had time to
fit in a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. Among them were several
high-ranking engineers from Google, the founder of the community
organising tool Meetup, a vice-president of the firm behind the
blogging platform WordPress, and an executive from Blue State Digital,
the internet strategy firm that had done a fair bit to help Obama to
the presidency the previous November.